I've been hearing from a lot of you looking for my videos, after my YouTube account having been suspended. Don't worry! All my videos that were on YouTube are also available on this site, and on my Vimeo channel.

Why did this happen?

The YouTube content review process is set up in such a way that when they think you've done something wrong, you get one appeal (which you must make without knowing the reason for your content being flagged), and if you lose that appeal, there is no recourse whatever; nor do they provide any feedback on why any such decisions are made. This makes YouTube inherently hostile to controversial content, such as content that skirts close to sexual topics, because every time a user flags something, there is a chance that the reviewer of your appeal is having a bad day, or also doesn't like the content, or whatever -- and if they reject your appeal, you're hosed.

What can be done about it?

Most importantly, if you find a broken link to a YouTube video on this site, let me know so I can point it to the correct Vimeo video.

In terms of YouTube -- I could say "vote with your feet" and use a different video site with policies that ensure publishers can get meaningful review of erroneous policy decisions; but realistically, YouTube doesn't care about the amount of traffic my audience represents. The people YouTube does care about are their advertisers and engineers; so if you advertise with YouTube, or if you know someone who works at Google, mention to them that you're not happy about the way YouTube arbitrarily bans content without any discussion with the publisher or feedback from the community.

Didn't the videos get banned because of nudity?

Nope. YouTube's community guidelines actually allow nudity in educational videos, and they have previously decided appeals on that issue in my favor. The message I received when my account was suddenly suspended without warning said:

We are constantly working to keep YouTube free of spam. It's not okay to post large amounts of untargeted, unwanted, or repetitive videos.

So apparently they somehow think I was spamming. When I sent in an appeal detailing how I was in compliance with every part of their related set of policies, the reply I got was simply:

Thank you for your account suspension appeal. We have decided to keep your account suspended based on our Community Guidelines and Terms of Service. Please visit http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines for more information.

In other words, they absolutely refuse to either explain what I did wrong, or reverse the decision. When I responded again pointing out that I could hardly have "repeated" violations when the previous strike on my account had been reversed on appeal, they just repeated their first generic response.